Fat Acceptance Roundup, Revisited

“The Great Fat Acceptance Roundup” is great but not complete. Today’s Childhood Obesity News post adds to the collection with an overview of our other reports about various aspects of fat acceptance.

Often, the philosophy seems to shade over into borderline pathology. Unbridled fat acceptance can foster elaborate excuses, self-justification, creative rationalization, self-delusion, and other unhealthy practices and states of mind. To counterbalance that, many courageous obese people go online and admit to how they fool themselves, and try to fool others, about their “condishun.”

In this day and age, it is very easy to find such reading matter as the the online biography of a 300-pound 13-year-old, but that isn’t the worst part. The real tragedy is the contagious mindset that promotes, for instance, the alarming phenomenon of “gainerism.” Some people actually intentionally become morbidly obese, and treat this transformation as if it had no more consequence than the decision to become a blonde or have an ankle tattooed.

When fat acceptance is reinforced by tradition and the weight of cultural pressure, the situation becomes pathetic because its victims are un-rescuable. Sadly, there are nations and religions whose values include the encouragement of morbid obesity in women, even to the point of assuring it through coercion. In this area, the doctrine of diversity becomes very difficult to defend.

The concept of “healthy at every size” is endlessly debatable. At worst, it is a self-destructive doctrine that probably doesn’t need to be spread around because it can lead others down the same path, which is not a straight road. It evolves into a vicious cycle. Acceptance paves the way for more weight gain, and to validate the increased girth, more acceptance needs to be applied — and so it goes.

Regular as clockwork, new discoveries are made about disease conditions caused by adiposity, and new reasons to take this medical problem seriously are exposed. “The Harm in ‘Fat Acceptance’” touches on the basic sense of unfairness felt by many people who resent seeing such a large slice of the nation’s healthcare budget funneled into dealing with the consequences of obesity. For some critics, it is easy to become quite angry over what they perceive as self-imposed, and increasingly expensive, illness.

Fat acceptance has become an industry, populated by plus-size models, advice counselors, specialized dating services, and at least one nightclub devoted to overweight socializing. Fat acceptance has become a facet of romance and a feature of courtship.

On one hand, it is heartening to believe that love is possible for everyone. On the other hand, romantic relationships are already so fraught with drama and potential pitfalls that adding the problems unique to morbid obesity cannot be easy.

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OVERWEIGHT: What Kids Say explores the obesity problem from the often-overlooked perspective of children struggling with being overweight.

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Dr. Robert A. Pretlow is a pediatrician and childhood obesity specialist. He has been researching and spreading awareness on the childhood obesity epidemic in the US for more than a decade. You can contact Dr. Pretlow at:

Presentations

Dr. Pretlow's 2017 Workshop on Treatment of Obesity Using the Addiction Model